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I Called Nine Clinics And Asked One Question: What Does A Year Cost?

Nobody would answer in writing. So I spent six weeks writing it down myself — and the gap between what a session costs and what a year costs turned out to be where all the money is.

By DAVID MERCER

August 2026 · 11 minute read

Advertising, published by Magnali. Competitor prices are sourced at the foot of the page. Not medical advice.

The first quote I got was $18,000. That was for one course of stem cell therapy, at a clinic forty minutes from my house, and the woman on the phone said it the way you'd say the price of a sandwich.

I'm 61. I've been buying supplements since the Clinton administration. And somewhere in the last two years the whole category changed underneath me — it stopped being bottles on a shelf and started being appointments. Infusions. Injections. Memberships. My neighbour does a drip every other Thursday. A man at my club flew to Panama for a weekend and came back talking about cell counts.

So I did what I do. I got quotes. Nine clinics, four states, plus the shelf I already owned. I asked every one of them the same four questions and I wrote every number down in a notebook.

Here is what I found: this industry will tell you what a session costs. It will not tell you what a year costs. And the gap between those two numbers is where all of the money is.

6.2K

The Four Questions I Asked Everybody

I'm not a doctor and I'm not going to pretend the biology is my department. What I can do is read an invoice. So I asked every option the same four questions — the same four, in the same order, no exceptions — and I've printed the answers in the same four boxes on every one of the cards below, so you can scan straight down them.

Six approaches. Worst to best.

What I'll say for it: the underlying biology isn't nonsense. NAD+ does decline with age in humans — that part is well documented, and IV is the highest-bioavailability route there is. People do report feeling something.

Where it fell apart: nobody leads with the loading phase. Four to ten sessions in the first fortnight, which is one to eight thousand dollars before you have even reached maintenance. Then maintenance, monthly, indefinitely, two to four hours in a recliner each time.

So I went looking for the trials showing the infusion delivers what the clinics advertise, and they aren't there. Matt Kaeberlein — one of the most cited aging researchers alive — has described the existing studies as preliminary and not rigorous enough. The decline is established. The fix is not.

The clinic will tell you your dose in milligrams, to be fair to them. What nobody could hand me was the study behind the route. Weakest evidence, loudest marketing, most hours of my life. It's the only option here that failed all four questions, and that's how it ends up last rather than the most expensive one.

^{MY HONEST VERDICT}
Real molecule. Expensive theatre.

What I'll say for it: it's the only option here with no adherence problem whatsoever. You do it, it's done, nobody has to remember anything at 7am. That's a real advantage and it's why it isn't last on this list despite being the most expensive thing on it. Regenerative medicine is also serious research in the indications where it's actually approved.

Where it fell apart: I asked three clinics how many cells I'd be getting, from what source, and what the release testing showed. I got three different answers and one brochure. When the industry's own cost guides have to explain that a patient can hear the same two words and still be looking at wildly different products, that isn't a price range — that's an unregulated market.

Then the arithmetic. Eighteen thousand dollars, once, for something the clinic itself describes as varying between patients. That isn't a course of treatment. It's a bet.

^{MY HONEST VERDICT}
The most money and the least paperwork.

What I'll say for it, and I mean this: this is the only thing on the entire list that will find a tumour. If something is genuinely wrong with you, the imaging is real medicine, and I'd take it over everything else here without blinking. On my third question — can you see your own numbers — it's the best in the field by a mile. Nothing else comes close.

Where it fell apart for me: I walked in thinking I was buying health. I was buying measurement. Look at the fourth box on this card. The membership tells you what's happening; the interventions are quoted separately, on top — and every one of them is somewhere else on this page. You pay $20,000 to be told you should probably start peptides. Then you pay for the peptides.

There are now an estimated 800 of these clinics in the US. Four to six touchpoints a year. Excellent days, and a great many ordinary ones in between.

^{MY HONEST VERDICT}
A diagnostic. Priced like a treatment.

An honest word for it: this came closer than anything else on the page. It is not the expensive option — anyone telling you peptide therapy is a rich man's game is comparing it to stem cells, not to a serious supplement protocol. And it's daily or near-daily, so it clears the first question cleanly, the only option besides the winner that does. On cost it lands right on my $5,000 line: the low end scrapes under, the realistic end doesn't.

Where it fell apart — questions three and four, and hard. Most of these compounds aren't FDA-approved. They're compounded, or they're bought as "research chemicals" from websites that print not for human use on the vial. The regulatory ground has moved twice in three years: a 2023 FDA review pushed several into restricted status, and a February 2026 announcement moved about fourteen of nineteen back the other way.

I'm 61 years old. I do not want my morning routine to depend on which way a federal reclassification went this quarter.

And then it's needles, indefinitely. Reconstitution, sharps containers, refrigeration, a prescription that keeps needing renewal, labs, follow-ups. My honest read on myself is that I'm good at that for about five months.

^{MY HONEST VERDICT}
Beaten by paperwork and needles — not by price.

This is the only other option that came in under my $5,000 line, which is why it finishes runner-up. It's also the one I'd have bet on before I started adding things up. It's what I was already doing, and buying the ingredients separately is supposed to be the frugal way to do this.

Where it fell apart — and it isn't the money, it's me. I take maybe eight of the fourteen. Some mornings four. I have bottles I cannot remember starting. Nothing ever failed: no bad reaction, no event, no moment. Things ran out and didn't get replaced. And right up until I counted, I'd have told you with a straight face that I was "taking my supplements."

Then the third question. I pulled every label and tried to work out what I was actually getting. Three said "proprietary blend," which means they don't have to tell you. Two listed doses in the low double-digit milligrams against studies run at hundreds. I had been paying four thousand dollars a year for a shelf I could not audit and was not finishing.

And here is the thing I genuinely did not expect. Buying the ingredients separately was not the cheap way. My counter came to about $4,100 a year. What I moved to comes to about $3,200. I had assumed for a decade that the individual bottles were the economical choice, and I had never once checked.

^{MY HONEST VERDICT}
What I'd done for a decade. Not as cheap as I thought, not finished, not readable.

I want to be careful here, because I've just spent fifteen hundred words being hard on everybody, and it would be cheap to go soft now.

SO LET ME START WITH WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT

It is the most expensive thing on a supplement shelf. $266.66 a month — $399.99 if you buy a single month instead of the three-month tier — is not a normal price for powder and capsules, and if you walked past it in a shop you would keep walking.

It will not find a tumour. If that's what you need, go back to #4 and buy the imaging. I mean that seriously.

And it is not a medical intervention. Nobody is injecting anything. If you want the drama of a clinic, this will disappoint you.

Here's why it still cleared all four.

One — it reaches me every day

About $3,200 buys 365 days of something happening. Twice that buys four appointments at a clinic. Six times it buys one afternoon in a stem cell chair. That isn't a marketing line — it's just what the money gets you.

Two — the twelve-month arithmetic

This is the part that surprised me, so let me be precise about it. I did not start out expecting the winner to also be the cheapest. I assumed I'd end up arguing that it was worth paying more. It wasn't more. A year of it came in under my old counter, under peptides, under a year of drips, and at a fraction of the clinic or the stem cell quote.

One caveat, because it matters: that's the three-month tier. Buy a single month at a time and it's $4,800 a year, and peptides pull level again.

Three — I can read the dose and the study

This is the question that actually decided it. Every dose is printed on the panel. Nicotinamide riboside — the same NAD+ pathway the $800 drip is aiming at, taken orally, every morning, with published human data behind the precursor. Spermidine. Ubiquinol. PQQ. TMG. Apigenin. Astaxanthin. No proprietary blends. Nothing where I'm told the formula is the secret.

I could take that panel and compare it, milligram for milligram, against a published study. I could not do that with a single other thing on this list. Not the clinic, not the drip, not the peptide vial, and — this is the embarrassing part — not most of my own shelf.

Four — I'm still doing it

One scoop. Capsules. Serum at night. No refrigeration, no sharps container, no appointment, no prescription renewal, no reclassification, nothing to fall off. It's month nine and it's still happening, which is more than I can say for the fourteen bottles.

^{MY HONEST VERDICT}
Not the cheapest. The only one I could both verify and sustain.

The Magnali Longevity Protocol

The only one of the six that cleared all four questions. Every dose printed on the panel, taken every morning, with no appointment, no needle and no prescription attached to it.

It isn't the cheapest thing I looked at. It was the only one I could both verify and still be doing in month nine.

⚠️ Selling out fast — I’ve already stocked up for 3 months.

^{WHAT IT COSTS}
$399.99 for one month. $799.98 for the three-month tier — buy two, get one free — which works out to $266.66 a month, and is the price every figure in this article is based on.

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